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Luke, I'm Your Father

The iconic line that forms, perhaps, one of the most gasp-worthy moments of cinema. Calm down nerds I know this line wasn’t actually spoken by Darth Vader. But now that I have your attention, I’d like to direct you to a more Indian version of it:

“OYE! TU JAANTA HAI MERA BAAP KAUN HAI ??!!”

That one line summarises most of the life of the average Indian, trying to act tough, like Nemo trying to act gangsta with the sharks. From a club to a school, I mean you could probably even trace this as far back as the Messiah. Remember when Jesus said, “OYE! TU JAANTA HAI MERA BAAP KAUN HAI ??!!”, being the Son of God and stuff.

On a serious note, though, this little line of pseudo tough melodrama is a symbol of all the frustration that most of us have pent up in our psyche. Look around, you’ll see more frustration per square inch than there was last year. Ask your parents, it’d have been exponentially less during their childhood. And so on.

All the things that were sold to you in the name of ‘making your life easier’ have turned against you. A dead phone battery, a punctured tire, a slow laptop, a bad road and that frigging lift under service!

And aside from these matters of materialism, there also lies the problem of the average Joe, who tries to push his limits at every step, but soon learns how even that has its limits.

Overspending to make an impression leads to fiscal trouble. Trying to get rid of that nagging guilt leads to alcoholism. Trying to justify that leads to shitty health and broken families. And that leads to more fiscal trouble. And the vicious cycle goes on.

It’s this frustrated cycle that devours large swathes of the populace in this country. Road rage becomes as common as your use of the word ‘like’ in one sentence. Riots break out because some political leader had a better twirled moustache and whatnot. Finally, India gets called intolerant and shit.

And then there is the other half, those who misuse this Baap facility with impunity. The people who’s baaps are in influential positions in the pecking order of society. Everyday you’re flooded with stories of some politician’s kid getting away with law breaking, or some traffic officer’s kid driving underage and drunk, and getting away with it.

Although it is true that India hasn’t invaded anyone in 10,000 years, but with the amount of acumen that our dear country holds, we could conquer the whole world. Seriously. We’ve all heard the American jokes on Asians being smarter than everyone else, haven’t we? Why then, have we not been able to figure out for ourselves, that we could solve half of our life’s problems just by taking shit a little easier. Being a little more relaxed. Not throwing fits when the driver in front of us is slower than we’d like him to be. Not getting mad when someone says something we don’t like. Most of these things can be solved with a calm dialogue. We’d not be mad about people littering the road, spitting on walls, peeing where we walk, nah!
But we’ll have our tits on fire if we are ever asked to wait for a table to eat. We find it easier to be one of them, the entropy just comes easy!

As much as you’d wish life was easy, for most of us it isn’t. You have to wade through piles of competition, tons of literal and metaphorical shit to get anywhere in life, and that pisses you off. You try to choose the easy way out of everything. But when you find none, you get mad and you vent. Now I’m not making allusions to Marijuana or anything, but I am saying that if everyone would just calm the fuck down down for a second, our world would be a much safer, more peaceful and better place to live in. Everyone’s baap can then get back to work that isn’t about bailing their kids out of trouble.